6. We use screens for a purpose, and we use them together, rather than using them aimlessly and alone.
6
The Good News about Boredom
6. We use screens for a purpose, and we use them together, rather than using them aimlessly and alone.
In the history of the human race, boredom is practically brand new—less than three hundred years old.
The English word does not appear until the 1850s, and its parent word bore (as a noun—“he is such a bore”) appears only a century earlier. The French word ennui begins to mean what we call “boredom” around the same time.1 Before the eighteenth century, there simply wasn’t a common word for that feeling of frustration and lassitude that overtakes so many of us so often—not just in long lines at the grocery store or the airport but in our own homes as well.
Could it be that modern life is boring in a way that premodern life was not? How could this be? Our world has more distractions and entertainments than we can ever consume. We feel busy and overworked in ways even our grandparents couldn’t have imagined (even as many of us work far less hard, physically, than most of them did).
Time and Limits on TV
How many hours do your children spend watching TV in a typical week?
But that’s actually why we get bored. Boredom—for children and for adults—is a perfectly modern condition. The technology that promises to release us from boredom is actually making it worse—making us more prone to seek empty distractions than we have ever been. In fact, I’ve come to the conclusion that the more you entertain children, the more bored they will get.
Do you set any limit on the amount of time they can spend watching TV?
n = 991 US parents of children ages 4 to 17 whose children watch TV on a typical weekday
This may seem totally wrong to any parent who has been desperate to quiet down restless young children. Put on a brightly colored, fast-moving video, and your kids will stay slack-jawed and motionless for the half hour it takes to get dinner on the table. (Is there any half hour more stressful in more homes than the one right before dinner? Friends of mine with three young children used to call it “the witching hour,” which is probably unfair to actual witches.) What could possibly be wrong with something that solves such an urgent problem so neatly?
The problem, as with so many short-term solutions, is that solving the immediate problem requires leaving a bigger problem unsolved—and actually makes the bigger problem worse.
How Videos Bewitch
The truth is that the real “bewitching” doesn’t happens when our kids are going half crazy with hunger and pent-up end-of-the-day energy and parents are feeling all the accumulated frustrations of the day. It happens at many moments when we give ourselves over to technological entertainment.
Because make no mistake: the videos we put on for our kids—or the video games we pull up on our phones in our own moments of boredom—are designed, unconsciously or consciously, to produce a bewitching effect. And that effect is achieved by filling a screen with a level of vividness and velocity that does not exist in the real world—or only very rarely. Because it is rare, we instinctively respond to it, and indeed take delight in it.
In my backyard, with its mottled shades of green, suddenly I spot a cardinal flitting from one tree to another. He is vivid red and gone in a flash. If I hadn’t been gazing out the window, I would have missed him. During a moonless night, a meteor suddenly streaks across the sky, just barely catching the corner of my vision. Only by lying on my back for minutes or hours did I make myself available to see that brilliance.
But the entertainment we serve up to our children, and ourselves, constantly fills the screen with movement as swift as the meteor’s and colors as brilliant as the cardinal’s. It is purposefully edited to never require too much concentration or contemplation; instead, it grabs our attention and constantly stimulates our desire and delight in novelty. But in doing so, it gradually desensitizes us as well.
Watching movies or TV shows from the early days of moving pictures reminds us of just how frantic this attention-holding game has become. In the early days, cameras could stay still and on-screen subjects could utter whole paragraphs of dialogue. Now cuts get faster and faster; colors get more and more saturated. Keeping us entertained is getting harder and harder. We are bored far more easily than we once were.
The same is true in thoroughly adult entertainment. Twenty years ago The Sopranos was a critical favorite and audience hit in part because of its boundary-pushing depictions of sex and violence, along with its intricate plots of jealousy, loyalty, and betrayal. As I write, the hit show of the moment is Game of Thrones, whose levels of psychological drama, not to mention lurid sex, violence, and violent sex, make The Sopranos look like something from an age of innocence. A world in which The Sopranos can seem innocent is a world ratcheting its way toward being unable to be shocked by anything—which is to say, a world completely full of boredom.
As screens—movies, TV, video games—present a world far more colorful and energetic than the created world itself, they not only ratchet up our expectations for what is significant and entertaining; they also undermine our ability to enjoy what we could call the abundance of the ordinary. Even when there is no cardinal in my backyard, it is full of varied colors, shapes, and sounds: the rustle of the breeze in the bushes, the subtly different leaves and bark of oak and maple, the infinite varieties of green against the changing sky. Even when there is no meteor shower, the night sky’s stars and nebulae are of countless different brightnesses and even shades of color, and they shimmer in the air. They form constellations in our ancestors’ imaginations and our own. Seeing a cardinal or a meteor is a special event, but in fact the very ordinary analog world is itself charged with beauty and surprise.
And the ones who used to be able to see this ordinary abundance in all its glory, in all its full capacity to delight and transfix our attention, were children. Children were the ones who simply went out to play in the ordinary world, even with no toys at all, because they had something far better than toys: grass and dirt, worms and beetles, trees and fields. The world they played in was rich, substantial, and rewarding of attention: the closer you looked, the more you saw; the more you listened, the more you heard.
This world is lost to many of our children, and to ourselves. Even the “nature” that surrounds many of our homes is shallow in a technological way. A typical suburban lawn depends on many technological devices, each of which makes something far easier than it was for previous generations: lawn mowers, pesticides and fertilizers, highly refined seed, and automatic sprinklers. The lawn itself is a kind of outdoor technological device, composed of uniform green grass, kept crew-cut short, with little variety or difference.
A peasant family in the Middle Ages had none of this technologically uniform pleasantness. They would not have had a lawn, or possibly even a yard. Their children would have wandered out into meadows and perhaps the thin edges of forests. A meadow has countless different species of grasses and other plants, plus flowers in the spring and summer, of different heights and habits. If you pay attention, you cannot possibly get bored in a meadow. It is all too easy to be bored on a lawn.
So here is one result of our technology: we become people who desperately need entertainment and distraction because we have lost the world of meadows and meteors. Quite literally lost—where can my own children go to see a meadow? How far from the city would we have to drive for them to see a meteor in the night sky? But very nearby are technological forms of distraction, from video games to constantly updated social media. They do little to develop our abilities to wait, pay attention, contemplate, and explore—all needed to discover the abundance of the ordinary.
It is surely not coincidental that all the earliest citations of the word bore in the Oxford English Dictionary—from the mid-eighteenth century—come from the correspondence of aristocrats and nobility.2 They did not have technology, but thanks to wealth and position they had a kind of easy everywhere of their own. The first people to be bored were the people who did not do manual work, who did not cook their own food, whose lives were served by others. They were also, by the way, the very first people to have lawns.3
Distraction and Delight
Boredom is actually a crucial warning sign—as important in its own way as physical pain. It’s a sign that our capacity for wonder and delight, contemplation and attention, real play and fruitful work, has been dangerously depleted.
Boredom may have peaked at the height of the industrial age, as children sat in mechanical rows of desks at school and adults were slotted into assembly-line rows, whether in blue-collar factories or white-collar offices, reduced to cogs in an industrial machine. But there is a new challenge in our postindustrial times, with vast amounts of computing power channeled into screens we carry everywhere. We now have the technology to be perpetually distracted from boredom, and thus we never realize how bored we really are.
Standing in every line you will see people thumbing through an infinite scroll of messages, images, news stories, and posts on their glowing rectangles. They are waiting in environments that, if they were not so familiar, we would recognize are indeed brutally dull: either, like most airport lines, devoid of any hint of the complexity and beauty of the organic world or, like most grocery store lines, numbingly overstuffed with packaging and commercial messages. So we all turn to our array of apps for relief (Facebook for the olds, Snapchat for the not-so-olds, something whose name I don’t know yet for the fourteen-year-olds). We are not bored, exactly, just as someone eating potato chips is not hungry, exactly. But overconsumption of distraction is just as unsatisfying, and ultimately sickening, as overconsumption of junk food.
You probably wouldn’t be reading this book if you hadn’t had at least a few times in your life when you were thoroughly unbored—by a good story, a long walk, or an absorbing piece of music. At the end you felt alive, refreshed, and alert. But you probably wouldn’t be reading this book if you hadn’t also spent an hour being distracted from boredom by the “junk feeds” on your phone—and at the end just felt disoriented and spent.
This is why our short-term solution to the witching hour—to bewitch our children with technological distraction—in the long run just makes things worse. And as with all the things we do to our children, the truth is that we are doing it to ourselves as well. I am horrified at the hours I have spent, often in the face of demanding creative work, scrolling aimlessly through social media and news updates, clicking briefly on countless vaguely titillating updates about people I barely know and situations I have no control over, feeling dim, thin versions of interest, attraction, dissatisfaction, and dislike. Those hours have been spent avoiding suffering—avoiding the suffering of our banal, boring modern world with its airport security lines and traffic jams and parking lots, but also avoiding the suffering of learning patience, wisdom, and virtue and putting them into practice. They have left me, as the ring left Bilbo, feeling “all thin, sort of stretched, if you know what I mean: like butter that has been scraped over too much bread.”4
Weeknight Plans
On a typical weeknight, how do your children generally spend their time?
Select all that apply.
n = 1,021 US parents of children ages 4 to 17
Screens on Purpose
As with so much in our mediated world, the solution to this mess is astonishingly simple, and radical only because it is so rarely done. The problem isn’t with our devices themselves—it’s with the way we use them. We simply have to turn off the easy fixes and make media something we use on purpose and rarely rather than aimlessly and frequently.
So when we do sit down in front of a TV screen, it will be for a specific purpose and with a specific hope, not just of entertainment or distraction but of wonder and exploration. When we do scroll through social media, it will be to have a chance to give thanks for our friends, enjoy their creative gifts, and pray for their needs, rather than just something to take our mind off our tedium.
And this means that most of the time, the screens stay blank. We will never, ever figure out how to help our children—and ourselves—survive that maddening half hour before dinner if we always settle for the screen. Instead, we will simply decide that whatever else happens in those confounding moments of children’s boredom and parents’ frustration, we will find some solution other than mediated entertainment.
The good news is that the more often we resist the easy solution, the easier the solution will be to find—because our children (and we ourselves) will start to develop capacities to explore and discover that will make them less prone to be bored in the first place. The discipline here is committing to this simple rule: the screen stays off and blank unless we are using it together and for a specific creative purpose. Then we can put nudges in place. If the craft table is always set up and within earshot of the kitchen, 5:30 p.m. is an ideal time to get out the watercolors or the finger paints (our craft table was designed to be stainproof and waterproof, but an equally good solution is to have an old table devoted to total mayhem, with a rubberized picnic tablecloth underfoot).
Family Time
In the past two weeks, how many times did your family do any of the following together?
Mean average among all parents.
n = 1,021 US parents of children ages 4 to 17
And when we do put on a video or otherwise fire up a screen for a purpose, we’ll follow another principle: never entertain your children with anything you find unsatisfying, just like you shouldn’t feed your children anything you don’t enjoy eating yourself. Feed them with food that is both tasty and nutritious—and entertain them with movies, books, and stories that are both tasty and nutritious too.
This doesn’t mean avoiding all “children’s” movies or books (or food). It just means avoiding the ones that are too simple or simplistic to satisfy adults. Plenty of children’s entertainment passes the adults-too test. My wife and I still recite passages aloud to one another from the Dr. Seuss books we read to our small children; they may be doggerel, but they are endlessly inventive and delightful. One of the great virtues of the movie studio Pixar is that almost all its films have enough complexity, texture, intelligence, and heart to be fully and deeply enjoyed by adults. There are many “children’s Bibles” that I find saccharine sweet and would never have let near my own kids, but Sally Lloyd-Jones’s best-selling Jesus Storybook Bible is surprising and moving, with its artful words and graceful art, every time I open it to a random page.5
The fact is that even our world diminished by technology is still stuffed with wonder. There is a meadow within a short drive of our home, and we’ve sometimes driven an hour or more to get to a place with a sky dark enough to see a meteor shower. There are movies that repay our attention, books worth reading when we are ten years old and rereading every ten years until old age. Give a child watercolors or finger paints and enough time and sheets of paper, and she will one day paint something that will be worth framing and keeping on your wall for the rest of your life. The lawn outside may be no meadow, but you can still find worms and beetles if you look carefully, and you can spot the occasional cardinal.
We will stay indoors some days and evenings, yes, and enjoy the best art and entertainment that our astonishingly creative fellow human beings have created—but by enjoying the best, on purpose, rarely and together, we’ll become the kind of people who can also find the best in anything, wherever we are, even alone. We’ll become the kind of people who can never be bored.
Crouch Family
Reality Check
I can say with little hesitation that by severely limiting our children’s access to screens and mediated entertainment, we gave them this kind of childhood: one grounded in the beautifully simple and endlessly complex created world.
But my own life has been more and more infested by distraction and shallowness over the last ten to twenty years. My life has a toxic combination of two things: a great deal of time in tedious settings like airports, and a great deal of freedom, the free time that is necessary for the creative calling of a writer and musician. In both of these settings, seemingly so opposite from one another—the grim sameness of travel and the blissful silence and open hours of a writer’s daily schedule—I have been sucked into the most trivial forms of distraction.
In this, as with so many things in this book, the biggest problem was not the kids—it was the dad.